Nvidia may back Nscale’s West Virginia data-center loans

A guarantee with a customer attached

The campus’s first building is covered by an Anthropic contract and is planned to deliver 460 megawatts of capacity using Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The companies are also discussing a separate deal worth about $45 billion to build a second building.

For Nvidia, the arrangement would extend its support for cloud providers beyond chip sales and leases into the financing risk of building infrastructure. Nvidia has invested about $170 billion in the sector and provided credit support to neocloud providers and major customers, The Information reports. That total includes $1 billion in convertible financing for Nscale in September.

The guarantee would deepen Nvidia’s ties to Nscale while helping secure a major customer for its chips. Anthropic, one of the largest buyers of AI compute, spreads its infrastructure spending across multiple chipmakers. An investor told The Information that Anthropic’s involvement likely explains Nvidia’s interest in keeping Nscale’s project moving.

The buildout is already under strain

Nscale has struggled to advance its projects. In August, it had about 25,000 advanced AI chips operating, a small fraction of the nearly 500,000 it plans to deploy. At the West Virginia site, construction runoff repeatedly flooded neighboring homes. The project received state approval in September after months of negotiations.

This month, Microsoft abandoned plans for an Nscale data center in England after the site’s grid connection was delayed until the 2030s.

The financing question matters because Nscale hopes to go public at a valuation of up to $35 billion as investors grow more doubtful that it can deliver large data-center projects. Neoclouds rent out AI computing capacity but lack the large businesses and cash reserves that can cushion a setback. By the week before the end of October, shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each fallen more than 30%, CNBC reported.

Who ultimately carries the risk

Anthropic’s own ability to fund rapid expansion is another uncertainty. The company filed paperwork to go public this week, but Blackstone warned investors that after an IPO it could receive a credit rating below investment grade. That could raise its borrowing costs and make it more reliant on stronger partners to guarantee its debt.

I think the guarantee is less a vote of confidence in Nscale’s execution than a way to keep a valuable customer and a large chip deployment within reach. What the announcement leaves unclear is how much exposure Nvidia would accept if construction falters—or whether it would be able to find a buyer and tenant on workable terms. The more Nvidia underwrites the infrastructure around its chips, the harder it becomes to separate selling compute from taking on the risk of building it.